A Close Encounter With Time
by BalrogsBreath
Summary: WIP : Jayne, sentenced to babysit Serenity, encounters a strange blue box... Crossover between Firefly and Doctor Who.
1. Chapter 1

Title: A Close Encounter With Time  
Summary: Jayne, sentenced to baby-sit Serenity, encounters a strange blue box... A crossover between Firefly(Serenity) and Doctor Who (10).  
Rating: K for mild swearing. Subject to change.  
Disclaimer: I own neither Firefly nor Doctor Who  
Authors Notes: I couldn't help myself, honestly. It practically wrote itself. I'm working on another crossover at the moment as well – I'm cursed by them, methinks.

Chapter One

According to Mal's plan, the firefly class ship Serenity was to dock at a nice cozy planet right smack-dab between Reaver space and the core. According to plan, Jayne Cobb - mercenary for hire - was going to hop ship and send a nice letter to his mother at the mail stop. He would even have used a couple of big words to impress her, despite the fact that they would both be in the dark to meaning of them. Zoe was going to find honey cakes for her husband, Wash, who was in turn going to try his damnedest to track down a small puppy dog - just to annoy the hell out of the crew. River was going to dance in the streets and her brother, Simon, was going to apologetically calm her down and buy her a snow planet to eat. Book was going to meditate and Inara was going to hunt down a new stash of tea with Kaylee, but new outfits were an expected casualty to their credit stash.

But where Malcolm Reynolds was concerned, very little went as planned. Reavers pushed further from the edge of space with each passing month, slowly encroaching on the safety of the core and after a too-close encounter, Mal had directed Wash to backtrack to Ralia, a planetoid a wee bit too close to core-space for Mal's (un)lawful liking. Harboring fugitives didn't bode well for one's flying permit, regardless of the innocence of said fugitives.

The ship slowly descended on a flat landing spot, smack dab in the center of Ralia's seediest spaceports. Mal hadn't been happy about that spot, who would, when the moment Serenity's hanger opened, they were bombarded with prostitutes (and not the classy one's like Inara) and men wanting to con them out of their very last credit. But they'd let Jayne go out first, scare off the leeches that called themselves men, and (reluctantly) push away the prostitutes. There was a reason Mal had kept him on after hiring him – muscle meant more than words and money in so many of the places they went.

Mal had let them go with the strictest of instructions. No wondering off. The girls were to always have one of them men with them, except for Zoe (Inara had protested, but Zoe had given her 'the look' and she backed down). Everyone was to carry a weapon, except for River (River had gone to protest, but instead decided to inform everyone the exact speed of a sonic blast). River and Simone were to go with Mal to get the gossip on their situation, and Zoe, Wash, Kaylee, Book, and Inara were to stock up on supplies and fuel.

Jayne, Mal said, was to stay within a five-meter radius of Serenity at all times.

"What?"

"We'll be needing someone to keep an eye on Serenity. I sincerely doubt anyone can break in past her doors, but I imagine they'll be able to do a fair bit of damage before they figure that out. I don't want that happening. So just stay around and look big, Jayne." Thumbs under his suspenders, Mal grinned at him. "Keep an ear out for trouble. If you hear something, radio in and let us know."

"But…"

"You heard me. I won't be having my ship vandalized just because you wanted to feel up a girl. You stay around!"

"No gorram way, Mal! We've had crap job after crap job, and nothin' to shoot at. You aint leaving me here to be the ship's babysitter!"

But Mal had just pointed his finger at him and said, "No arguments!" like an angry father. Jayne had (oddly) pursed his mouth, glared, but kept silent.

The group two groups left, splitting off into different directions, happily chatting and grinning like buffoons. Jayne spit in the dust next to the ship. And waited. He did a few sets of push-ups, grinned and waggled his eyebrows at the passing tramps, and entertained himself for fifteen minutes. Another fifteen he spent squinting and reading all the advertisements and posters within his eyesight. He learned that Madam Li was having a whore blow out and prices were cheap and that Dog-Chicken was the cheapest meat around. And then there was nothing left to do.

So Jayne Cobb paced. He wasn't prone to pacing in normal circumstances, it was a waste of energy that could be put to other uses, namely beating the balls off another merc. But this wasn't normal, and Jayne was bored. Twenty minutes ago he had chased off a con man selling Bliss, and while that was mildly thrilling, is adrenaline was far too low for his liking. He had flirted with all the working girls that went by, but since his lack of money was evident, they quickly moved on to better-funded game. Leaving him standing awkwardly in front of the firefly.

And Jayne paced. He could leave the ship, easily enough – just walk away, come back in an hour and pretend he'd never gone. Or walk away completely and hop on a better paying ship (but that would require him to leave a few guns behind, and that wasn't something he was keen on doing). A month ago he probably would have rolled his eyes at Mal's back and took off before the other man could even so much as blink. But things had changed, and Jayne felt the need to prove his loyalty again, which was a strange enough concept that it had Jayne frowning.

He'd never had much use for loyalty, it tended to drag a man down when he was much better just shooting and running and leaving who ever was stupid enough to trust him dying in the dirt. He was a merc after all. It was just what he did.

But Mal did trust people. And so did little Kaylee and Inara (sometimes) and Book. And they were good people, and he had betrayed them. And Jayne felt the need to fix all that, which was an odd enough a thought that he felt he might want to listen to it.

And so Jayne Cobb played the ship's babysitter, growling at seedy pedestrians and increasing his dirty vocabulary.

And that's when it happened.

A blue box, quite tiny next to Serenity's hull, whined itself into existence with a terrible grinding noise that Jayne immediately took to be the sound of an attack. Within a split second he was behind a crate with his gun drawn.

"What in the hell…?"

tbc

Please let me know how I'm doing and send me a review. I'm very human, after all, and I'd like very much to know what you think. Thanks for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

Title: A Close Encounter With Time  
Summary: Jayne, sentenced to baby-sit Serenity, encounters a strange blue box... A crossover between Firefly (Serenity) and Doctor Who (10th Doctor Era).  
Rating: K for mild swearing. Subject to change.  
Disclaimer: I own neither Firefly nor Doctor Who  
Authors Notes: I couldn't help myself, honestly. It practically wrote itself. I'm working on another crossover at the moment as well – I'm cursed by them, methinks.I'm feeling rather unsure of my characterizations. If you could let me know how I'm doing and give me a hint, I would be very appreciative. Thanks! Also, thank you to those who read and reviewed the first chapter! I truly appreciate the time you took to leave me a message -huggles-

Chapter Two

_"What in the hell…?"_

The blue box said nothing in return. What it did do, was wiggle. Jayne blinked, and the box wiggled a second time before the door opened and out walked two individuals, a brown clad man and blonde girl.

Normally, Jayne would have blinked, swore a couple of times, and walked the other direction. Or, if the two looked up for a good fight, he might have gone in for some conflict – he sorely needed to punch something. But these two were smiling broadly, (grinning like fools more like, Jayne thought with a scowl) and hanging off of one another like there was no tomorrow. Which was just plain odd. And that was forgetting about the blue box.

And so, unable to walk away thanks to his unsaid promise to stick around and baby-sit Serenity, and not really wanting to punch out a girl, (at least one who hadn't done him any wrong yet) Jayne stayed where he was, crouched behind the crate with his gun drawn.

"Where are we, Doctor?"

"Oh…" The man looked around with a puzzled expression. "Well, hmm… this is strange."

The girl looked at him. From the mercenary's vantage point he couldn't quite see what her face said, but he was fairly certain it was like the one Kaylee had when Serenity's engine sputtered a bit. "Not again…" she said, but in such a way that she didn't seem terribly upset.

"Well, I _thought_ the TARDIS was going to take us to Chula, a nasty planet, really, but with the most amazing crab cakes you will ever eat, but it seems she decided somewhere else was better…" He twirled on what Jayne noticed were terrible shoes, all cloth and no leather. "I'd say this was an Earth colony planet. Probably mid twenty-seventh century. I say planet, but this was probably a moon…"

"I thought you said we didn't colonize until later."

"Well, as a species, most of you didn't. This colony is actually a bit of a fluke." The brown-clad man continued to look about while he spoke, sticking his hands into his pockets. "Well, I say colony. It's really a whole slew of planets, a solar system, if you would, though more or less artificially created. Terraforming and all that – really quite advanced for their time. Course, they have the Alliance…"

At this point, it was safe to say that Jayne was quite uncomfortable. A closet sized blue box had materialized out of nowhere and its contents were speaking about the Alliance in fairly loose terms with a strange accent. And the man was wearing a brown coat. It all spelled trouble to Jayne, who's spelling was quite atrocious.

The merc stood up and held his gun out at his side, tense but not directly threatening. "Who the hell are you?" he asked. Truth be told, he was quite pleased with himself for being so civil.

The man blinked and peered at him like one would at a bug beneath a microscope. He strode forward, either ignoring the large weapon in Jayne's arms or completely ignorant of it. "Hello! I'm the Doctor, and this is Rose, we're travelers…"

The man broke off as the gun leapt up from its docile position and nuzzled itself against his chest. "Well, that's not very nice…"

Jayne smiled at him in the way one smiles at a cockroach before they step on it and listen for the crunch of its exoskeleton. "I don't want any trouble," he said. Though, it wasn't exactly true. "Dong ma?"

The girl, still attached to the man's arm like a clam, whispered in her companion's ear, "What's 'dong ma'? Why didn't the TARDIS translate it?"

"The TARDIS translates the whole language. For these people, Chinese is as much a part of their language system as English. Which is a bit weird, actually. It would be like translating English slang into normal English – it would ruin the whole point of it."

Jayne scowled but the man paid no mind.

"Is this your ship?" He asked, in a terribly cheerful manner. If you asked Jayne, he was far too happy about the gun stuck in his chest.

It was at that exact point in time that Mal, River, and Simon returned from their rather pointless excursion. It turned out that only three people in the whole city knew anything about their latest heist. These people, though, were so gone on Bliss by the time Mal came around that the only information they were able to gather was that Simon had a nice ass and that Mal needed to lighten up. Neither man appreciated the information, and they had taken the opportunity to make a tactical retreat.

They wound back through the spaceport, avoiding feces and piss on the ground and retracing their previous path. And then they found themselves looking at Serenity, their safe haven, just as they had left her. Their sweet, sweet relief from this awful spaceport.

Only not.

Mal blinked. The blue box sitting in front of his ship did not go away. Neither did the two people. Mal's hand wormed its way to rest atop his holstered gun.

"Howdy, there," he said slowly as he and the Tam siblings approached the interesting, but not at all welcomed, site.

"Mal! They up and came out of nowhere!" Jayne hissed. He did not let his eyes wander from the man, and kept his gun trained on him.

This comment struck the captain as a mite bit odd. That the merc had fallen asleep on the job was possible, but not all that likely, and any other way that these two people had snuck up on their hired muscle was less than appealing. The two stuck out like a sour thumb, and their giant blue box didn't help a bit. Mal let his mind drift to the more cynical. There wasn't a short supply of companionship floating about in short skirts, and it was more than possible that Jayne had enough coin saved up to enjoy himself. His eyes narrowed, but he ignored his thoughts for the time being.

"Hello!" The man, Mal noted, was quite chipper. And not in the nervous sort of way most men in his situation were. He seemed honestly happy. The girl on his arm seemed amused as well. Mal wasn't sure he liked this new, carefree attitude. Most men on the end of a gun, especially Jayne's gun, were pissing their pants.

"You mind explaining exactly who you are and how came to be standing in front of my ship?"

"Oh, so it's your ship. She's lovely. 03-K64-Firefly class, correct? Fairly good, as far as light freight crafts go, but they didn't quite stand the test of time…"

The man's accent was decidedly odd, much like Badger's actually. And Mal was certainly not happy about how much information the stranger was in possession of. Simon, who stood slightly behind Mal with his sister, thought just the same thing. River, however, was quite occupied with staring adamantly at the man's strange blue box.

"That's right," Mal said. He ignored Jayne's fidgeting. "And I'd appreciate it if you'd leave. We don't want any trouble."

"Why is that, huh?" The man addressed the girl, who, if Mal had to guess what her expression said, was humoring him. "Everywhere we go, people think we're out to make trouble. Well," he looked Mal in the eyes, "we're not. Just me and Rose, out to see the world. And maybe eat a crab cake or two."

River took the startled silence that followed as an opportunity to voice what had been nagging at her all day. "It tastes funny," she said, and stuck her tongue out in the air and wiggled it.

Jayne muttered under his breath, "crazy girl," to which the strange man got a perplexed look on his face and quirked his eyebrow. He then slowly pulled a hand out of his pocket.

Mal's weapon shot up and leveled with the man's head, and Jayne's fingers simultaneously crept closer to his trigger. "I'm not the sort of man who likes killing, but don't think I won't shoot you," Serenity's captain said coldly.

The man cracked a grin. "Oh, not to worry. I don't have any weapons, I think they're quite silly, me."

"And, neither do I!" The girl was quick to add from beside the man, obviously not eager to be shot.

"See?" Pushing past the tense situation and the raised guns, the man pulled out what Mal could only call a fancy pen. "Harmless!"

"Doctor?"

Simon looked up quickly, but the girl who had spoken the words had attention only for the man she was with. "You're a doctor," he asked.

Not looking up from the small tool in his hands, the man replied, "Of a sort." He depressed a small button and the thing beeped a strange, long sound. "Ahh… well, that's quite unexpected."

"What is it?" The girl asked.

"She's right. It does 'taste funny', though I can't taste it myself. There's an excess of nitrogen in the air around this place."

"What?" Simon.

"Is it dangerous?" Rose.

"What gorram hell are you talking about?" Jayne.

"Well…" He paused. "Yes. Actually, very much yes. In fact, from the rate that the contamination is escalating, we'll probably succumb to it in a little under a half hour." He pushed the button again. "It's more than that…" He got a stunned look on his face, "this whole city is being poisoned!"

tbc

Thank you for reading, everyone! Please let me know how I'm doing and send me a review. I'd love to hear how my characterizations were.


	3. Chapter 3

Title: A Close Encounter With Time  
Summary: Jayne, sentenced to baby-sit Serenity, encounters a strange blue box... A crossover between Firefly (Serenity) and Doctor Who (10th Doctor Era).  
Rating: K for mild swearing. Subject to change.  
Disclaimer: I own neither Firefly nor Doctor Who  
Authors Notes: I know it's been a while since I last updated, but please keep in mind that I make no promises regarding chapters and when they'll be posted or finished. Since I can't control life I don't see much point in trying. For those who stuck with me, though, thank you for continuing to read and having such patience. Thank you to those who read and reviewed the first chapter! I truly appreciate the time you took to leave me a message -huggles-

Chapter Three

"_It's more than that…" He got a stunned look on his face, "this whole city is being poisoned!"_

There was a beat of nothing as the preposterous information was soaked up before Mal jammed his thumb onto the talk button on his radio. "Zoë! Get everyone back to the ship. Now!"

Zoë's voice crackled back, "Problem, sir?"

"The kind where you need to be back on this ship ten minutes ago, yes."

"On our way, captain."

Mal let the radio go. "You have some gorram explaining to do," Mal said, addressing the brown-clad man along with the blonde girl on his arm.

The man and the girl, however, paid him no mind. He raised his strange little pen shaped machine up and down and then in all sorts of odd directions and patterns before beginning to quickly walk off, away from Serenity. The girl jogged to catch up with him, and neither paid any mind to the guns and their wielders around them.

"Hold it!" Neither Jayne nor Mal were about to let the man and his trumpet just walk away. The two guns, Mal's and Jayne's, swiveled to reset on the retreating figures. "Stop!"

The man spun on his heel, his long brown coat whipping around him. "You coming, or what?" He asked, and then turned again and continued his fast walking.

"Gorram weirdos," Jayne muttered.

Mal got a funny look on his face. "Jayne, stay with the ship. When Zoë and the others get back, make sure she's sealed up and running on her own air supply." Without any other warning, Mal began to jog after the odd couple.

River allowed her gaze to be ripped from the strange blue box. She bounced up on the balls of her feet, gave her brother a small kiss on the cheek, and ran after Mal.

Simon blinked after him. "But…

Jayne attempted to sigh, but it turned into a growl. He ground his foot into the dirt, and finding that unsatisfying, he threw a punch at Serenity's hull. "Ouch." When that failed, he swore profusely with at least one word Simon had never heard before.

The two men caught each other's gaze. "Well, this blows."

Simon sighed. "Indeed."

River was ecstatic – she loved to run. She caught up to Mal within seconds and together they tagged the heels of the odd duo in front of them.

"Ah! Decided to come along then?" The man asked, never breaking his step. How he was able to run and speak at the same time without panting was beyond Mal. Unable to do the same, despite his fit state, he merely grunted in what he hoped would be assumed as an affirmative.

River, however, began to sing and apparently had no qualms about having to pause to gasp in a breath or two as they sprinted throughout the city. "Pocket full of rosies…"

The man gave her a sharp look and slowed his long legs, his little metal wand out in front of him. "The readings are getting stronger…" he said, and pulled to a halt. The girl and Mal stumbled to a stop beside him, but River bounced in place.

"Ashes, ashes, we all fall…" River continued to mutter her song quietly.

The man in the long brown coat again gave the small young woman an odd look. "You shouldn't know that song…" he said slowly, "and it's poesies, not rosies."

"Doctor?" The blonde girl looked at him, concerned. "The air?"

"Oh! Right." The metal wand flashed blue in his hands again. "_This_ seems to be the central point of the nitrogen contamination. It is all spreading out from here."

"But, there's nothing here." Rose, who had regained her breath, threw her hands on her hips and drew her brows together.

"You're completely right…"

And, he was. The place the four had stopped at was the outside of what had once been a diner but was now long abandoned. On the corner of a seedy street, the diner façade had fallen into disrepair and only half a chair could be seen through the boarded up windows and doors. Long strips of yellowed tape ran up and down the door and were covered in the careful stamps of the Alliance's seals, but they thin paper had been broken ages ago, and no one here had seen even the backside of an Alliance agent in over a month.

"But, looks can be deceiving," the doctor drawled.

The blue stick flashed again and unable to stand being kept in the dark any longer, Mal asked, "what in gorram hell is that thing anyhow?"

The Doctor was ignoring him and muttering to himself instead. "The radiation's center… but how is it spreading…"

Rose took pity on Mal and explained. "It's a sonic screwdriver."

Mal blinked. "A what…?"

"A sonic screwdriver." She paused to mime the little piece of metal. "It's a screwdriver… that's sonic."

Mal shook his head. It could have been a golden screwdriver for all he cared. These people were completely off their rockers.

"Rose!"

The girl, who Mal had decided was even bubblier than Kaylee, whipped herself around and re-devoted all her attention to the odd man. "What is it, Doctor?"

He flashed her a wild and wide grin and shook his head a bit. "I'll tell you what it is, Rose, it's alien."

Mal's jaw dropped.

"There's no way anyone from this time or cluster of little planets could have modified it in such a complex way. The composition even had me confused for a moment or two, and that's saying something."

"Modified _what_, Doctor?" Rose had her arms crossed in front of her chest and had placed all her weight on her left hip. Despite the disbelieving looks (looks that were slowly turning to anger) that Mal was giving her from behind her back, the Earthling girl was not about to be swayed from getting an answer from the Doctor. This was hardly the first time he had rattled off in incomprehensible technological terms and forgotten about the less-than-advanced alien background she had. Not that she felt hindered by her lack of understanding. Honestly, she didn't much care _how_ certain alien things worked, like the T.A.R.D.I.S., so long as they did and so long as the Doctor and her stayed together.

The Doctor's smile widened even further, regardless of how impossible that seemed to Mal.

River, meanwhile, had finished counting the bricks on all the visible buildings and had since compared the missing bricks, the damaged bricks, and the intact bricks in her mind. She had discovered the life expectancy of a brick was quite low, and also that three months ago someone had removed one entire side of the abandoned restaurant's wall and then shoddily put it back together with a different type of molder.

"Someone," the Doctor said quickly, as he always did when he had discovered something or became excited, "has taken an engine, an Alliance space type, but fairly outdated, and coupled it with a Bosh ship's atmosphere system. The Bosh are a sort of space nomads, but I've never seen anything of theirs on a planet before. In fact, it's quite taboo for a Bosh to even land on a real planet, let alone leave bits of his ship on one." The Doctor scratched at his head. "That' quite weird, actually."

Meanwhile, Malcolm Reynolds lost his patience. He was normally a very composed man and he prided himself on being able to handle himself in just about any situation. But enough was enough.

"I don't know where you folks are from or what you're doing out here in this corner of space, but let me tell you one thing: if I learn that you had me call in my crew from their first real break in over two months for some wild goose chase over fairy tales, I will not be a happy man," Mal said in a quiet and dangerous voice. "I'm a fair man, but there are plenty of men around these parts who aint."

River, who was inching towards the abandoned diner, covertly stuck her tongue out at him.

Despite Mal's menace, the Doctor only glanced at him. "No fairy tales, here, I'm afraid." Without even glancing around, the odd man strode purposefully forward, still talking, and ripped past the paper seals covering the door. "The Alliance engine supplies nearly unlimited power since it simply taps into the city's sources. The Bosh atmosphere system, a brilliant piece of design, actually, physically replaces old air with new air by taking in the molecules, scrambling them around a bit, and then shooting them back out. It takes heaps of energy to do, though."

The Doctor in the lead, the four of them walked through the dingy entrance and into the dusty room. It took their eyes a few seconds to adjust from the florescent buzz of the outside to the dank dim of the diner. What they saw, though, was two huge metal contraptions, one blue and steel and sleek, the second orange and brown and bumpy, almost like coral. It was something Mal had never seen before, and he was not shy to let his mouth hang open.

"Gorram…"

Rose swallowed. "So, if the Bo…?"

"Bosh," the Doctor supplied.

"Bosh atmosphere system is for replacing air, where is the nitrogen coming from?" She said, voicing the thought that had been in Mal's mind too.

"See, _that's_ the ingenious bit. Someone's gone and meddled with the Bosh's work. Instead of converting carbon dioxide to a oxygen, nitrogen, and what not mix, now the system is converting everything into straight nitrogen."

"Poison," Mal spit out bitterly.

"Yes, exactly. This is defiantly sabotage."

And that was when it happened.

River coughed as the nitrogen, which was slowly replacing the air all over the city, began to fill her lungs.

tbc

This is unbetaed, so if you see anything that drastically needs help, please feel free to let me know (in fact, I would appreciate it a lot). Thank you for reading, please let me know what you're thinking and leave a review – they are very helpful and nice to get.


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